Vincenzo Bellini: Adelson e Salvini – Daniele Rustioni

   in Opera Now (Mar, 2017)
Opera Rara offers another morsel for our jaded taste buds, this time Bellini’s first opera, Adelson e Salvini, in a new critical edition providing three acts. Composed in 1825 as a student piece in Naples, it offers some fun Rossinian rough and tumble contrasted with the first sounds of Bellini’s distinctive musical voice. Comic arias and bouncy finales balance against the languorous and arching phrases more typical of the composer, and with which he went on to conquer the operatic world before his untimely death just 10 years later. The plot is essentially twaddle, but need not detain anyone from enjoying the music, which is conducted with insight and brio by …